Everyone knows that scars tell stories. What we often overlook is that emotional scars tell stories, too.

I have many emotional scars, marks from past events — and I don’t just mean from that one time I thought it’d be a great idea to write 15 pages of my final paper on the due date.

If you see me outside my dorm room, I’m almost definitely wearing my Harvard ID on a lanyard. That’s an emotional scar. If you see me awkwardly standing at a door, trying to calm my anxiety about opening the door and probably looking like an eavesdropper in the process, that’s an emotional scar.

I’ll reiterate that I don’t want pity. Pity is actively detrimental to progress, especially when it comes to disability, an escape mechanism allowing people to disassociate themselves from problems while maintaining their sense of comfort. I don’t want sympathy, but empathy.

As obvious as my physical scars may be, people usually can’t see most of them — all the way down my back and around my legs, all the IV marks that are too small to notice. Likewise, very few people know I’m visually impaired unless I tell them, because the natural instinct is to see my walker and stop there, assuming I don’t also have any disabilities that can’t be seen. And while I can’t speak to it, I need to acknowledge the unique challenges those whose disabilities are all invisible face, such as people doubting their disability.

We need to acknowledge invisibility. For me, invisibility comes at 11 p.m., the time of night when I’m alone in my dorm room. In some ways, being alone is freeing. I can do my homework while listening to my favorite video game music, or pretend to do my homework without actually doing it, or abandon any pretense of doing it and have a staring contest with my Kirby plushie instead (I’ll win someday).

But also, at 11 p.m. I’m alone, and being alone is freeing, and that means thinking.

Being disabled isn’t great for mental health. In high school, when I first started reflecting about my condition, I internalized something obvious: I couldn’t do everything that my classmates did, at least not in the same way as they did. I couldn’t do athletics or build machines or get an entry-level job. There were two things I could do just as well, or occasionally better, than everyone else: academics and video games. I put everything I had, my whole self-purpose, into them.

Disabled people face simultaneously low and high expectations. When someone sees I’m disabled, there is an inevitable subconscious assumption that I’m incompetent. My default state is needing to prove myself to everyone I meet, from friends to interviewers, or else I risk falling into stereotypes of what disabled people are. Yet, the moment I prove myself, I become an “exception” and a “model,” and I become trapped in high expectations that serve to differentiate me from “other disabled people” — who are perceived as unsuccessful largely because they aren’t given the environment and support they need to succeed.

In high school, every A- I got stung, as did every question I answered wrong in class, everything that wasn’t perfect. Societal ableist attitudes led me to doubt my skills and question whether I had any worth or self-purpose.

Constantly wearing my ID on a lanyard is convenient, but the real reason I do it is out of insecurity, so my classmates recognize me as a Harvard student — in many of their eyes, I know I don’t look like one. I think about that at night.

At the same time as I try to make myself seem strong, I feel like a burden to other people. In high school, I was afraid of talking to people in case they were only being nice to me out of pity, and they didn’t want me around. Imposing myself on others scares me, since because of the way disabled people are generally treated, I’m conditioned to think that I’m not worth it.

I eventually learned that most people genuinely did want to talk with me. But I’m still sensitive about it, terrified of overstepping others’ boundaries. If I’m standing outside a room, staring awkwardly at the closed door, it’s not because I’m eavesdropping, but because I’m irrationally anxious about bothering others. I think about that at night.

At 11 p.m., I think about these things, and what is invisible becomes perceptible. But no one is around to know. Of course, everyone has experiences — emotional scars, reasons why they do what they do — that others don’t know about, but it is exactly because of this universality that the point becomes so important: Disability cannot be reduced to a mechanical inconvenience, of needing to find convoluted accessible entrances or to magnify small text.

Living a disabled life means that disability forms part of my identity, shaping the experience of my life in a meaningful way beyond what others can see. Because disability leaves a mental impact, and mental health takes a tangible form.

Ben T. Elwy ’23 lives in Quincy House. His column “Living a Disabled Life” appears on alternate Tuesdays.

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